Category Archives: Ty's Top

NUMBER #1

The way I hear it, the best cure for the party from the night before is leftover bacon and sausage pizza and warm nog.

My wife, apparently, did not enjoy 2013, what with my many trips to the emergency room, and her mother’s many trips to the hospital, but I’m a different kind of person, I fondly remember all the trips HOME from the hospital, so…good times.

But as we say goodbye forever to 2013, never to be recalled, unless we still have bills from last month to pay, we finish with the MOST popular and LEAST popular Bun Toons of the previous year.

The winner humbled your bunny blogger…mostly because it wasn’t even remotely about me.

Well, it worked. HOO boy did it work. The Bun Toons got to feel for a week what it must be like to be Neil Gaiman for a day. He linked, we got avalanched, fun was had by one and all.

Please….. the experiment is over, no need to do it again. I feel all dirty about getting all those page hits the first time.

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The SECOND of my ego-destroying entries today, comes from the LEAST popular Bun Toon of the year.

I’ve been playing music and singing since I was about five years old, and for a good chunk of my twenties, it was my primary source of income. Marriage and Batman curtailed the chart-topping success that was just inches from my grasp, but I like to keep my hands moving and my throat warbling whenever I can trap an audience in a room.

Last summer, my friend, singer-songwriter Glenn Reid, released a new jingle jangle country-pop adult contemporary single that I played and sang harmonies on, and I thought I’d take a moment to promote it on my Bunny Blog, since I don’t get a chance to show off my fingers and pipes all that much around here.

Apparently, if you don’t mention Neil Gaiman or Batman, the numbers just aren’t there.

If ANYONE clicks to the link, there’s some fun country-pop songs there that Glenn wrote and sang, and I sing back-up and play keyboards on….heck the page is full of ‘em!

Next year, we write a song ABOUT Neil Gaiman and Batman and send this internet into a tizzy…

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Since this is a celebration of last year’s ego-destroying moments from the Bun Toons, I thought I’d finish the retrospective with a Bun Toon that was fairly well received (though not quite top five material), and perfectly demonstrates why ego is the enemy of us all.

Enjoy your new year, Bunny Peeples. I’ll be back soon with ALL-NEW Bun Toons for the needs of a 2014 type of audience.

Like this:

NUMBER #2

Ah, the silver medal. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Of all the losers, they came in first”.

The loser’s winner this year is another Superman related entry on the Bun Toon countdown…or at least a Kal-el related entry, because I’m not sure I ever saw Superman in this story.

But an alien named Kal-el? Sure…

(Spoilers for the MAN OF STEEL MOVIE coming up).

I confused people with this review, as I’m still approached by folks who think I hated the movie. I didn’t hate the movie, I actually rather liked it. I thought it was an excellent alien-first-contact movie with a race of super-powered monsters…(Kal-el being one of ‘em). I can’t wait for the sequel where Batman and Wonder Woman try to beat the hell out of the alien menace flying around Earth named “Superman”. I’d be scared poopless of this xeno-disaster and I’ll be rooting for Bat-Fleck to take him down.

None of that means I didn’t like the movie. It’s just not a Superman movie.

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The Bun-Toon-as-Movie-Review up top was delightfully well received by the internet. The Bun-Toon-as-Game-Piece was not.

During the San Diego Comic Convention weekend, I published a Bingo card for convention attendees to fill out. The winner won something, I don’t recall what…because no one played. So no one won.

I’m taking my game and going back home.

We had thousands of cards printed up and distributed through FedEx. It cost us tens of thousands of dollars. We had to take a second mortgage on the house, and now I greatly regret it. The prize would have bankrupted me, though. I think it was a new car, so there’s that, I suppose.

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Since it’s my countdown, and we’ve already done the second best and the second worst, I’m tossing in a BONUS Bun Toon: This was a follow up to the MAN OF STEEL review a couple of weekends later. I figured since Man of Steel made mad bank, there would be imitators.

Very slight MAN OF STEEL Spoilers…

In truth, I just wanted to reprint that horrifying Lucy-pulls-the-football panel again. I love showing off that I could have drawn the Peanuts strip for the last five years and no one would have known, well except for all the blood.

Like this:

Number #4!

Everyone knows that first is gold, second is silver, and third is bronze, but how many knew that fourth was Coca-Cola? It’s why athletes refuse the prize because all that corn syrup is bad for a body in training.

We continue our annual look back at the triumphs and failures of Bun Toon with an entry celebrating the 75th anniversary of ACTION COMICS #1 and comicdom’s greatest, non-flying, Golden Age, female, DC character who isn’t Ma Hunkle. Screw Clark and Superman, they get all the media attention…this is…

I still have a crush on Margot Kidder, Teri Hatcher, Phyllis Coates,and Erica Durance. Noel Neill looked too much like Lucille Ball for my tastes, and as far as I know, there haven’t been any other Lois Lanes except in the cartoons and funny books.

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As I just said, it doesn’t matter the name of the actor playing the character of Lois Lane, I love ‘em all.

Actors, and stage names, was the subject of the following ALL-TRUE-TALE of the Bunny, but it scored nary a blip on the internet radar when I revealed this hidden moment from my life last fall. If I had thrown Lois or Superman into the narrative, it would have been BIG, I tells ya BIG!

But then it wouldn’t have been TRUE.

I think this one didn’t do any traffic because I skimped on the title lettering. Lesson learned: Always use a Comicraft font for the titles. People flock to good lettering.

I’ll see you here again tomorrow for the #3 most popular Bun Toon of 2013, and the third least successful entry, BOTH of which feature Superman, except for one of them. (Well neither, really, but I understand marketing and you won’t come back if I say they were cartoons about lesbians.)

NUMBER #5

The year draws to a close, and I close out my drawings for 2013 with my annual list of what worked, what didn’t and what tickled my bunny bone for the year. You get a replay of the five MOST popular Bun Toons of the last twelve months (chosen by most unique page hits) and the five that absolutely dropped into the ether with no attention whatsoever. We get a range of readership here at Bun Toon Central, with some posts being seen by as few as a dozen people, and some being seen by as many four of five dozen people.

Coming in at the what’s-below-bronze position of #5 on the big, big hit parade of 2013 was a Bun Toon done in the style of Dr. Seuss’ immortal classic, ONE FISH TWO FISH RED FISH BLUE FISH. The style suggested itself as a way to make a simple point even simpler, and since I was dealing with the complex issue surrounding Orson Scott Card’s writing an issue of Superman, Card’s particularly offensive positions on gay rights, and the possibility of a boycott of DC comics as a form of protest, I proved there’s no better way to start public discourse than to simplify it to the point of nonsense.

Obviously the BUN TOON worked, because there was no boycott of DC comics over this issue. It probably helped that Chris Sprouse, the artist originally hired to draw the Superman comic Card was going to write, backed out at the last minute saying he didn’t want to be part of this controversy, and could he please go back to just drawing pictures, and then DC cancelled the issue as an afterthought.

I’ll score that as a win all around.

BONUS MOMENT:

I returned to the ORSON SCOTT CARD controversy when the film ENDER’S GAME opened in theatres, with THIS screed about over-simplification:

There, now that I’ve given a reasonable, balanced opinion about the man and his body of work, you can understand the details better.

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Holiday themed Bun Toons were the big losers this year, as you’ll see as we go along. After the great COLUMBUS DAY disasters of previous years (and the ARBOUR DAY debacle of ’05) , you’d think I’d learn to keep away from the subject of grand important holidays, but I can’t help but punch organized days-off in the groin. It’s who I am.

This year, Easter (or BUNNY DAY as we call it around here) was a Bun Toon ignored by one and all. Lucky you, you get a chance to ignore it all over again. A bit of a warning, there’s some NSFW nudity coming up, but it’s subtle, you have to STARE at it for a while to see it, and then you feel all icky for staring.

Hah! I made you look at a woman’s European styled under-area, all in the name of making fun of Easter! HAH!

See you back here tomorrow for more successful Bun Toon fun featuring the comic industry’s leading lady, and another piece of crap no one liked featuring a true story from my youth.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Of course, as is tradition, we wish STAN (the man) LEE a happy 91st Birthday! Stan always has his birthday the same day we start the Bun Toon countdown because you know Stan, he’s trying to horn in on my action. Sheesh! You get the movie cameos big guy, stop trying to hog the Bun Toons!

It’s the New Year, you hung over revellers, and time for one last look back at the most popular Bun Toons of the last twelve months.

And to do that, my friends, I have to go to Hollywood accounting tricks, because I DO NOT KNOW which of the following two Bun Toons was the real winner. I know which one had more hits on my own particular blog, but that becomes meaningless when you take into account how many different blogs and websites reprinted both of these strips, driving the readership into many multiples of what the numbers were here. The first of the two was ACTUALLY the winner around here, setting the one day record for this website on the Saturday it went up, and the most “hit” Bun Toon of all time when the dust cleared. Like Frank Miller last year, the peoples love it when you take down a star…

A friend of mine made up a pair of t-shirts that read “I love Alan Moore more than you do” and “I read Halo Jones” and wore them around me without mentioning that he’d done it. No greater tribute to the Bun Toon could be had than destroying a white t-shirt with a black marker.

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Even though the numbers for “Who Watches the Industry?” turned out to be the highest single day and single post we’ve ever had around here, the NEXT Bun Toon had far more websites reprinting it than anything we’ve ever done, and it drove so much traffic to my homepage that we were getting fifty thousand unique hits a week for a while.

Bleeding Cool, I09, Forbidden Planet, MTV Geek, and dozens of other websites reprinted this toon as part of the news coverage of the summer Ghost Rider nonsense, and it was often quoted as some sort of authoritative source on the facts of the case as though I was a material witness.

I hope Gary is happy and well nowadays, and that the tsuris of the summer has cleared up. He raised a little money through the internet (and the efforts of Steves Niles and Bissette, if I recall) to offset some of his costs , and we’re all pulling for him around here. I’m as hippy-dippy, artist-over-corporation as they come, but every now and then I have to call bullshit when I see it, and the public narrative about his story became pure bovine waste as it picked up steam.

See you all in 2013, where we promise nothing but controversy, comedy and commitment to cartooning every week. This is a sickness with me – one that doesn’t involve fever, vomiting and diarrhoea, so it’s one of the better ones.

And finally, thank you. I really appreciate that you folks show up and read these compulsive little blurts of creative I do every Saturday morning. Some suck, some are memorable, but none of them go into the ether completely unseen. That’s all any artist in history has ever hoped for when he scribbles down the idea. Thanks to the internet, I don’t have to cut off my ear and ask brother Theo to pay my rent. Which means in the great story of human achievement, I kick Van Gogh’s ASS.

Like this:

We finish off the calendar year (but not our top five list) with an almost winner, and an annual wrong turn. All very fitting for 2012.

Back in the summer, a web-comic called “Order of the Stick” put together a Kickstarter campaign, hoping to publish a kick-ass collection of their strips (a delightful parody of Dungeons and Dragons, drawn stick-figure style). They needed a good chunk of cash to publish, something like forty thousand dollars if I recall…

But they raised over a million.

So I did this Bun Toon the next week.

My Bun Toon didn’t raise a million dollars, but it raised a decent audience for a fun laugh, which is what we’re all about at Bun Toon central. If I worked JUST for the money, I’d have gone into meth dealing like my mother always wanted me to.

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Our lovable loser this time out is entirely my fault. When the Zombie Apocalypse broke out this fall, I did a sequel to a Bun Toon that finished 2011 in my bottom five. The RETURN of Contessa Kristine Margarite Von Shoenefeld proved as unpopular as her first outing the previous year.

I keep suffering for my art, and now it’s your turn:

Obviously I’m the only one who finds her funny. I guess I’ll just have to do ten or fifteen more of these until I convince you.

Tomorrow is the start of 2013, and I’ve saved our TOP BUN TOONS of this year for tomorrow instead of today. This way I start the next year with GRAND SUCCESS and it has NOTHING to do with my mis-reading the calendar a couple of days ago when I started this. That would make me look stupid.

Like this:

More winners and losers of the year as we track the most and least popular posts of the last 12 months.

Our THIRD highest hit maker of the year came to us back in September, when I was in Montreal for a comic convention and didn’t have my scanner or my computer to get all photo-shoppy with. Undaunted, I drew the weekly Toon at teeny size on a single piece of typewriter paper at my Brother-in-Law’s house and scanned it with his fax machine. NOTHING stops the Bunny.

This strip was in reference to the then recent, and very exciting events of Avs.X — This was in those wild days before Spider-Man #700, when life was so simple.

As of four months later, Xavier is still dead, I think. But you never know, there’s probably a shadowy figure lurking around the Jean Grey school that might be him. I don’t read the X-Titles like I used to.

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I got a lot of encouragement to do MORE Bun Toons in this very minimalist style, without colour, without lettering, without any drawing skill, and a few weeks later I had exactly that opportunity when I found myself in a hospital emergency room one Saturday morning, to pass a kidney stone. While waiting for the excruciating pain to ebb, I asked the nurse for paper and pencil to Bun Toon from my sick bed.

Even with that level of dedication, no one read this one. It had a classical pee-on-yourself pathos ending and everything! So it’s not the sloppy, badly lettered artwork you guys like, it’s the sloppy, badly lettered drawings of Wolverine. Duly noted.